ir destination. As soon as the ice broke up in the spring, they
embarked on the Mayflower,--for so they had christened the craft,--and
within five days set foot on the soil of Ohio. Other bands joined them,
and by midsummer their rude huts and a blockhouse marked the site of
what was to be the town of Marietta, the first New England settlement
in the West. Across the Muskingum, at Fort Harmar, the new governor,
General St. Clair, had already taken up his official residence. Farther
down the river, Symmes planted a colony from New Jersey on the tract
which he had purchased; and within the next few years settlements were
made in the adjoining district, which Virginia had reserved as bounty
land for her soldiers. The vision of virgin lands in the Ohio country
was beginning to dawn upon the small farmer of the East. Emigration grew
apace. Between February and June, 1788, an observer noted not less than
forty-five hundred settlers drifting past Fort Harmar in their
flatboats, in search of new homes in the wilderness.

While the colonization of the Northwest was going on under the eye of
Governor St. Clair, hardy pioneers were laying the foundations of a new
society in the Southwest, without the protecting arm of the Government.
Before the war Daniel Boone had made his famous trace to "the country of
Kentucke" through the Cumberland Gap; and Robertson had led his colony
from North Carolina to the upper waters of the Tennessee. Settlers had
followed the long-rangers; and numerous communities sprang up by salt
lick and water course. In all these settlements there was much local
independence. For a time the people on the Watauga had established a
government of their own. Upon the cession by North Carolina of her
western lands, the settlers of eastern Tennessee took matters into their
own hands and prepared to organize as a State. Congress had just adopted
the Ordinance of 1784, and one of Jefferson's prospective States
included most of the land already appropriated by these pioneers. They
nourished, too, long-standing grievances. They were taxed for the
support of a government which treated them with contumely and ignored
their administrative needs. The movement toward independence acquired
such headway that not even the repeal of the act of cession by North
Carolina could stay its course. With a confidence born of frontier
conditions these "modern Franks, the hardy mountain men," as a
contemporary called them, drafted a constitu